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Lamb’s Tails

Christopher Driver

All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present by Stephen Mennell
Blackwell, 380 pp, £14.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 631 13244 9

Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the 14th Century including ‘The Forme of Cury’ edited by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler
Oxford, for the Early English Text Society, 224 pp, £6.50, April 1985, ISBN 0 19 722409 1

For a generation now, it has been a commonplace that in Britain food and drink are much discussed. Fewer people seem to notice that this has almost always been so, wherever the capacity to discuss anything is found. Pockets of unawareness are the exception rather than the rule: early redbrick university departments striving to differentiate themselves from Oxford and Cambridge; or the English gentry, who, as Lord Stockton has reminded us, taught their genteel imitators that it was bad form to notice the manna that came to dinner. In other times and places, both hunger and plenty have proved stimulating sauces for food discourse. Miranda Chaytor tells me that the dreams of a 16th-century Northumbrian witch elicited at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and prose: not just the lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon but the nectarine: ‘good god how fine. It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.’

Jane Austen’s more obtuse admirers or detractors often deem her either too witty or too etiolated for fleshly preoccupations at bed and board. But she achieves an imaginative universe where food and cooking do not need to be framed in externally observed, Dickensian set-pieces: their crucial role in her characters’ lives can be disclosed by passing reference. Emma is full of food, though scarcely a dish is described – apart from the egg whose soft boiling so perfectly delineates the character of Mr Woodhouse. We know exactly how Mrs Elton would have behaved at the grocer’s and how Mr Knightley would have carved a joint. Projecting these households into our own time, we can see Mrs Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones.

Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence remarked. Food is one of our supreme fictions. The history and sociology of the subject suffer from arrested development, but intelligent men and women in Britain were applying their minds and senses to the transformation of edible matter into culture long before more guarded minds in university departments, the British Council and the BBC caught on. Few bureaucrats, however fond of a free lunch, care to risk being accused of greed and frivolity by funding international, interdisciplinary inquiries of a kind taken for granted elsewhere.

They order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been eaten, and why, in Britain and France since the Middle Ages. However, at this stage the questions are at least as important as the answers. Moreover, by dividing his library-burrowing between London and Paris, Dr Mennell has done something to bridge the ditch of separation between France and Britain in the matter of food. If most British students of French culinary traditions are handicapped by excess reverence, almost all French scholars – Lévi-Strauss for one – are handicapped by blank ignorance, often of what British diet is, and almost always of what it means to its consumers.

Letters

SIR: It was good to see a review of an Early English Text Society book in your pages (LRB, 19 June) and to find your reviewer praising Curye on Inglysch both for the modesty of its price and for the excellence of its editing. But the genial Victorian founder of EETS, Frederick Furnivall, would have grieved to see his society described as a ‘forbidding’ institution which caters only for the ‘delicate [should that be ‘gross’?] appetites of language specialists’. Furnivall himself lectured at the Working Men’s College in London; and his intention when he founded the society, in 1864, was to make the work of English writers before the Renaissance available to more than language specialists. EETS is still not an esoteric body – in intention, at least. Indeed, we are happy that it should be treated as a book club by anyone interested in reading such things as the Mystery plays, The Cloud of Unknowing or the poetry of John Gower in proper editions at little expense. Any of your readers who may wish to join should write to the Assistant Executive Secretary for particulars. Her name and address is: Mrs Rachel Hands, 35 Beechcroft Road, Oxford OX2 7AY.

SIR: It was good to see a letter from Professor Burrow in your pages (Letters, 7 August) reaffirming Furnivall’s intention of using the Early English Text Society ‘to make the work of English writers before the Renaissance available to more than language specialists’. But I am afraid that the response of the common reader to his invitation to subscribe might well be: ‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.’ Even Late Middle English can be pretty hard going for the non-specialist, and earlier stages of English quite impenetrable; and the EETS glossaries, valuable as they are, are not a full solution to the problem. Using a glossary efficiently is a skill which has to be learnt (I spend several weeks every year teaching it to my first-year students), and it is in any case a very laborious way of getting at the sense of a work. In Furnivall’s day, EETS texts were often supplied not only with glossaries but with interleaved translations, or at least running commentaries in the margin which offered a guide to the meaning: but this is no longer EETS policy. I have been told on good authority that the main reason for this change of course was to keep expenses down. If EETS were publishing works for the exclusive use of specialists in Medieval English, this would be fair enough, but offering this kind of edition to the non-specialist is rather like offering a prospective house-buyer a pile of bricks – more moderately priced than the completed building, admittedly, but not really meeting the buyer’s needs.

I believe myself that interleaved translations, at least for the more difficult texts, would make EETS editions not only more accessible to the general reader but far more serviceable to professional Medievalists. I have reason to be grateful to Furnivall, since it was one of his EETS translations which started me on my own research, and it saddens me to see the high-quality scholarship of the EETS editions restricted to a handful of specialists.